We got new PCs with Windows 7 and installed CS4. InDesign is the product in this package we use most often, but we're having the same problem with other programs in CS4.

We have a ton of fonts that we brought over from our old PCs and we have discovered that bits and pieces of some fonts are not working. What's strange is this seems to be true with Open Type fonts and the True Type ones seem to be OK. I wouldn't swear that's the case with all the fonts, but it seems to be true for the fonts I've explored so far.

For example, in the Adobe Garamond Pro package, roman, bold, and italic were working, but none of the semibolds & smallcaps were.

I tried installing the semibolds & smallcaps to the Windows\Fonts folder. Didn't recognize them. I tried uninstalling the entire Adobe Garamond Pro package and reinstalling it. I re-installed both ways, by the old drag & drop method and by the new way of right clicking and selecting Install. Now the only bit of Adobe Garamond Pro that's working is semibold italic. Roman, bold, italic, smallcaps and all the rest are disabled.

I checked Adobe's online documentation which says:

The Creative Suite 4 installer installs fonts into a default system font directory. Many of these fonts are updated versions of fonts installed by Creative Suite 3. If the installer finds older versions of these fonts in the default system font directory, it will uninstall the older versions, and save them to a new directory. The default system font directory is:

The older fonts will be saved in the new directory:Apple Macintosh: <System Disk>/Library/Application Support/Adobe/SavedFonts/currentWindows: <System Disk>:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\SavedFonts\current

I have this directory <System Disk>:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\ but I do not have a SavedFonts folder. I tried creating one and putting font files into it, but it didn't recognize the folder. After restarting the whole system, the folder I created is gone.

Where am I supposed to put my font files so that they work? Is the Windows\Fonts folder the correct place for them? If so, why are only some parts working and others are not?

Do you see a <System Disk>:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts folder or a private fonts folder iin the InDesign Program directory? Putting fonts into either of these should work for ID. The commoin directory would make them available to other Adobe apps, too.

But as far as I know, they should be working fine in the system fonts directory. Try searching for and deleting all adobefnt*.lst files where the * is a two-digit number.

I have a Program Files folder and a Program Files (x86) folder. In neither of those, under Common Files or Adobe, is there a Fonts or SavedFonts folder. Though I did find the Fonts folder I made yesterday. I tried putting my self-created Fonts folder in Common Files in both Program Files and Program Files (x86). No dice; still only have the bold italic.

There are no "smallcaps" faces in the Adobe Garamond Pro family. "Smallcaps" are part of each font itself.

You should be readily able to install any and all Adobe OpenType fonts under Windows 7 by right clicking on the OpenType font and invoking the "install" options. We are not currently aware of any problems with any Adobe OpenType fonts or with Windows 7 in terms of the process of successfully installing such fonts. (I've personally installed literally thousands of OpenType fonts under Windows 7 without any problems whatsoever!)

Perhaps you are referring to some old Type 1 versions of Adobe Garamond?

OK, so perhaps I committed a technical error in mentioning smallcaps. But the rest of what I said is correct.

I have highlighed every single version of Adobe's Garamond in my fonts storage folder. I have right clicked & selected install. I have dragged & dropped. I get a message that says they are already installed and do I want to reinstall, and I say yes. I have deleted the files out of my Windows/Fonts folder and I did it all over again. Still no dice.

This includes the True Type (Adobe Garamond) and the Open Type files (Adobe Garamond Pro). The Adobe Garamond / True Type is installed and working fine. The Adobe Garamond Pro / Open Type files are the ones with bits & pieces missing.

My manager, who got the same type of PC I did, same Windows 7, same CS4, has been having similar problems with her Garamond fonts as well as Nueva and other fonts. As I said, I have not investigated every single font we own, but the problem does seem to be occurring with the Open Type fonts.

There are no such things as TrueType Adobe Garamond fonts. Sounds like something is very corrupted on your Windows 7 systems. Perchance did you try installing Adobe Type Manager (no longer supported by Adobe and not compatible with Windows versions beyond Windows XP) or any third party font management software?

I do have a suite of Adobe Garamond fonts that are being listed in a couple of different places as True Type fonts. It turns out that those are the fonts I have been installing and re-installing, not the Open Type ones. The True Type ones are installing and working just fine.

The Open Type fonts have not been installing because they are MIA.

It turns out that the Open Type Adobe Garamond Pro (AGP) fonts that were on my old PC and that I thought should be on my new PC are very mysterious. I still have access to that old PC so I could check into this. Though the AGP fonts are installed and working fine there, when I look for them in my Windows\Fonts folder on the old PC, no AGP Open Type files are listed. I remember encountering this situation with other Open Type files; I could see them in an application, but I could not see them in the Windows\Fonts folder.

This strange invisibility factor may be the reason why, when we carried all our font files over to the new PCs, those mysterious Open Type files apparently didn't come along.

We're thinking that when we installed CS2 (back in the old days before I worked here), some of those Open Type fonts were provided free with the CS2 as maybe some sort of teaser to try to get us to buy the entire package maybe? Anyway, we had them and it looks like now we don't. Thanks, Adobe!

As I said, Adobe never released Adobe Garamond in TrueType format. If you had such fonts, they were probably "converted" by someone from the old Type 1 versions of Adobe Garamond (or possibly came from a Windows NT 3, NT4, 2000, XP, or Vista system in which the Type 1 font handler was MIA in which case the OS converted Type 1 to TrueType).

I don't understand the sarcastic "thanks, Adobe" line. There is nothing that Adobe did to damage, hide, or otherwise frustrate your use of a font that you once legitimately had installed on your systems. Windows 7 and CS4 are quite compatible with no known problems of finding fonts that are properly installed on the system. Without examining the files you are trying to install as fonts, no one here can really hazard a guess beyond what we have already suggested as to what went wrong beyond the possibility that font files were corrupted in the transfer somehow. But we don't know.

I don't know where the True Type AG files came from. They were here when I got here. They are stored in a font storage folder labeled as Adobe. That's all I know.

The same is true for the Open Type Adobe Garamond Pro files. I don't know where they came from; they were here when I got here. Those were (and still are) working on my old PC. They worked only partially and briefly on my new PC. Now all that's working is bold italic. I went back to my old PC to try to recover the files that are still working there. But they are hidden in some way that I don't understand so that I am unable to move them over to my new PC so that I can continue to use them. I didn't do anything to make that happen.

I have had similar issues to the ones discussed here and perhaps they are one and the same - or something all together different.

I am trying to installed both .itf and .ttf versions of the same font (i know - this sounds silly - some database layout programs we are using dont see .otf files, as well as Microsoft not really liking the whole embedding of at .otf thing...). Anyway when I install - all manner of madness happens. Some of the .otf and .ttf versions are visuable and some completely disappear, only to reappear when I have seemingly uninstalled the others. Anyway I wonder if this is sort of part of the same issue.

I'm not yet running Windows 7, but from what I've seen all fonts that Microsoft is supplying these days OpenType fonts with a .ttf extension and the same name as the old TrueType versions. OpenType is basically a wrapper format that allows the use of either Type 1 or TrueType outlines across platforms. Vendors who use T1 outlines seem to rename the OpenTYpe versions, typically calling them Std or Pro and changing the extension to .otf to distinguish them from the old versions. This is a major help since having two fonts with the same name installed onthe system can cause no end of problems and confusion for the OS.

Hi Peter. You've helped me a lot in the past, so I thought I would try posting again to see if you could assist with a font issue I'm having.

I am yet another Windows 7/CS4 user who is missing fonts after moving my CS4 Creative Suite from XP Pro to W7. This same thing happened to our other graphics designer when she moved to W7, but that was months ago and the other designer cannot remember what she did to fix the problem. It seems that every time I open a file, there is a missing font: today it is Helvetica (T1) Medium, Helvetica (T1) Oblique, and Helvetica (T1) Bold (and let me just say that we use this font in almost every document we create). I am also noticing that quite a few of the fonts that were previously available in ID CS4 are not there. I have installed (right click, Install) all of the fonts from my old hard drive (which is now installed along with my new hard drive in my new computer as a backup from which I can grab anything I may have not copied over) that I can find, but many of them are missing the next day. Because we design legal documents and other items that are controlled, if I cannot find a font and have to choose another one, I have to reproof the entire document, so it is really necessary that I figure out how to get all of my old fonts back and working. I also need to make sure that all of these fonts are available across our graphics and print shop computers so that no one is choosing a font that is not available on someone else's computer.

The other designer here mentioned that she thought the problem might have something to do with how In Design names its fonts. Like someone above, I also do not know much about the ins and outs of the folders and files, so if you have an idea of how I could fix this, please use laymans terms. Thanks for any help you can give me.

Fonts that go missing after being installed on Windows is a Windows issue, not ID. The only thing I can think of is that you have multiple versions of some of these fonts, and the system is getting confused.

Have you tried packaging a file with these fonts on an old system, as suggested above? I would also try putting the fonts into C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts where they should be visible to all Adobe apps, but not others.

I checked the file you suggested (in Common Files) and it is completely empty. The reason we considered this an ID issue is because we don't have the problem with any other Adobe programs. Why would Illustrator and Photoshop recognize a font and not ID? Strange... Anyway, I will give the addition of the files to that folder a try. Thanks so much for the advice.

I added and moved fonts here and yon to no avail. However, I finally found help on InDesignSecrets.com. They suggested I add the fonts to the font file in the InDesign folder, which was empty. That seems to have enabled InDesign to actually see the fonts. I write this because I am seeing more and more people with this issue, and copying the fonts into this folder has, so far, solved my problem in a simple way. We'll see what happens as I continue to open old files!

Is that what you meant by "private folder in InDesign folder"? Too bad I didn't understand...I would have saved myself a lot of time moving files to all the many folders named Fonts on my system! This is the place you suggest: <System Disk>:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts folder but I used C/Program FIles (x86)/Adobe/Adobe InDesign CS4/Fonts. I know others must have the same computer illiteracy as I do, which is why I wanted to add my fix. I do thank you for taking the time to offer suggestions, even if I don't get them the first time!